Margo has been an amazing find and an incredible author in the Blazing Indie Collective. I’m honored to have released my novella alongside hers in the Falling in Deep Collection. In honor of her own release, Siren’s Kiss, She agreed to stop in for a bit and answer a few questions. (: Happy Release Day, Margo!
You can order Siren’s Kiss today. Do it. You’ll love it.
What is your favorite writing music?
Every couple of months, I put together new iTunes playlists on my phone. This summer’s playlist includes, among others:
“All Souls Night” by Loreena McKennit
“Drumming Song” by Florence + the Machine
“Follow Me” by Uncle Kracker
“Hammock” by Howls
“Hold Me Down” by Halsey
“Second Chances” by Gregory Alan Isakov
“Step Off” by Kacey Musgraves
“Voodoo” by Godsmack
I tend to include a pretty wide variety of styles. I have eclectic tastes, so whatever hits me as interesting at the moment gets added to the list
Where is your favorite place to find inspiration?
Wow. It depends on what I’m writing, I guess. I love the not-quite-rolling-landscape of North Central Texas where I grew up and where I returned when I had my own child. My current office is a partially-remodeled attic, and I don’t have any windows, so a friend of mine regularly sends me Texas landscape pictures to make up for that. I often take short breaks to soak in the cyber-view.
And if I need to relax and recharge, put me in water and I’m happy. Even a child’s wading pool will do.
But in the end, I can take inspiration from anything—a word, a phrase, a place, a person. I rarely have to seek inspiration; I try to breathe it in from everything around me.
What was your inspiration for Siren’s Kiss? Tell me about your characters.
Two years ago, I took my mother on a trip to Athens, Greece. For years, I’ve taught The Odyssey, Oedipus Rex, Medea—and seeing so many of the places I’ve talked about to classes was quite literally thrilling. I had tears in my eyes as I sat in the Dionysian Theatre below the Parthenon.
And I wondered what it would be like for someone who had lived the history to return.
So the novella opens with Skyla, a Siren who once had an affair with Odysseus, returning to land in order to stop a terrifying incursion into our world—and remembering that the world of humans doesn’t always mesh well with the world of the sea.
Any advice for new writers (like me)?
The very best advice I ever got was just this: keep writing new things. Always have a work in progress. Finish writing a piece, do a quick edit, and submit it somewhere for publication (or, if you self-pub, send it to beta readers). Then move on to the next project. Don’t wait to hear back—that way lies madness! If it’s rejected (and often it will be; that’s the nature of writing for publication—or if there are a lot of changes suggested), don’t let it get you down. Just revise it, then send it out again and go back to your work in progress. Be a working writer, not a writer-in-waiting. : )
About Siren’s Kiss
This is not a love story.
It’s been over two thousand years since I walked these shores, and even then, the man who broke my heart was centuries gone, sailed away into death—the last journey into yet another land where I will not follow.
Truth be told, though, he left me long before he died, gone away to rejoin a wife he hadn’t seen in twenty years, to reclaim a rocky, wind-swept island for a son he barely knew.
Gone home, to spin stories about his absence like his wife spun his death-shroud—picking out the stitches at night and reweaving them anew to postpone the inevitable moment when the stories wear thin and you find the monsters have been in your home all along, posing as suitors who would win your heart.
The poets lie, you know. They say our songs seduce the sailors, draw them into the ocean to drown.
But if the ocean sings to them, it is not our doing—no more than the earth’s call to us is theirs.
And Odysseus never tried to resist.
On the cliff above the Theatre of Dionysus, the Parthenon loomed, its marble columns partially obscured in scaffolding. The last time Skyla had been here, when the marble seats of the open-air amphitheater were new, she watched the Oresteia trilogy—tragedies to the Athenians surrounding her, but too far from reality to be anything but comic to Skyla. Agamemnon had been a monster, a tyrant of a man who murdered his daughter for the joy of killing, a sacrifice to the gods of power and control. When his wife Clytemnestra killed him in return, other women did not blame her. Their house fell, but it was not of her doing.
But the memories of men are short, and the stories they share shift and change, like the ocean’s surface.
Margo Bond Collins is the author of urban fantasy, contemporary romance, and paranormal mysteries. She lives in Texas with her daughter and several spoiled pets. Although writing fiction is her first love, she also teaches college-level English courses online. She enjoys reading romance and paranormal fiction of any genre and spends most of her free time daydreaming about heroes, monsters, cowboys, and villains, and the strong women who love them—and sometimes fight them.
Connect with Margo
Twitter: @MargoBondCollin
Love mermaids? Looking for a great beach read? The Falling in Deep Collection, a collection of 15 unique tales of creatures of the deep, is rolling out the first novella in their collection at the end of May.
From mermaids to sirens, Miami to Athens, dark paranormal romance to contemporary stories with steam, the fifteen award-winning and best-selling authors of the Falling in Deep Collection are bringing you mermaid tales like you’ve never seen before.
Every week beginning May 26th, 2015, we’ll be releasing one unique, never-before-published novella! Each novella will feature our favorite creature of the deep: mermaids.
The Falling in Deep Collection (May – September Releases)
Scales by Pauline Creeden
Ink: A Mermaid Romance by Melanie Karsak
Of Ocean and Ash by A. R. Draeger
Deep Breath by J. M. Miller
At the Heart of the Deep by Carrie Wells
The Mermaid’s Den by Ella Malone
How to be a Mermaid by Erin Hayes
The Glass Mermaid by Poppy Lawless
An Officer & a Mermaid by Blaire Edens
The Water is Sweeter by Eli Constant
Cold Water Bridegroom by B. Brumley
Immersed by Katie Hayoz
Siren’s Kiss by Margo Bond Collins
To Each His Own by Anna Albergucci
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